


Girls Don't Play Lakros

by eirtae



Series: The Kosta Family Drama [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Homophobia, Original Characters - Freeform, Slice of Life, ordinary people in the Star Wars universe - Freeform, rural life, space lacrosse - Freeform, supporting protagonist - Freeform, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:26:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23340160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirtae/pseuds/eirtae
Summary: Injustice on Ammasio! The Empire reigns, and in order to avoid the Imperial "legal" system, Lee Kosta has taken the fall for a friend and accepted responsibility for a crime he didn't commit. The sentence laid out by local law is gentle because of his young age: three months of tight probation and scrutiny. But time passes slowly trapped between school and his parent's house, and Lee is already desperate to find ways to ease the boredom...
Series: The Kosta Family Drama [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678558
Kudos: 6





	Girls Don't Play Lakros

**Author's Note:**

> The original title for this was "Sullen Teenage Kuo Moods", but I couldn't _quite_ convince myself to actually write that into the title bar. :')
> 
> I hesitated to upload this whole series because so much of it is so _mundane_ , but after the urging of a few friends, here I am. It's no less tangentially related to Star Wars than OOC modern coffee shop AUs, right?
> 
> As usual all thanks to my wife Polkera for the editing!

On his third article of the evening, Kuo was interrupted by a knock on his door, which he ignored. There were only two people who would be harassing him: Fain had taken to knocking to tease him about the fact that Lee had gotten the spare bedroom after Shan had moved, and his mother would enter and complain about something either way. 

Fain-or-his-mother knocked a second time, and Kuo looked up from his datapad to stare out the window and sigh.

A third knock, and this time it was accompanied by a voice.

"Kuo," came Lee's muffled voice from the other side of the door. 

Kuo's eyes snapped to the door, staring at it incredulously.

"Kuo, I'm bored," said Lee, and Kuo heard him bump his forehead against the door.

"Typical," muttered Kuo, eyes back on his datapad. He resented being Lee's last-ditch attempt at warding off boredom - if Dahl hadn't gone out to a party, there was no way Lee would be harassing him. 

"Kuo?" called Lee, knocking again. "Are you jacking off?"

" _What?_ " squawked Kuo, dropping the datapad on his bed. 

"Because I know Fain's out here, so if that's what you're doing I'll leave -"

Kuo dove off the bed, scrambling to get to the door as fast as possible to make Lee stop. 

"- you alone," finished Lee as the door slid open, his smile smug.

"Fuck you," hissed Kuo, his volume kept low on the off chance their mother might be listening.

"Wanna watch a holovid?" asked Lee, expression bright as he held up a chip and wiggled it between his fingers, completely unconcerned with Kuo's tone. 

"You just asked me if I was _masturbating_ ," Kuo snarled.

"Yeah," said Lee with a grin, "it works on Dahl, too."

The fact that Lee manipulated Dahl in the same way left Kuo floundering - on the one hand, _what the fuck_ , but on the other, equal opportunity assholerly meant that he was being treated like he was _normal_.

“It’s the one people keep talking about,” said Lee, briefly regarding the chip instead of Kuo. “That the weird theatre guy won’t run ‘cause it’s too violent.”

“I thought it was because it had too much sex in it,” said Kuo slowly, ignoring the question of where Lee’d gotten a bootleg. 

“Either or,” shrugged Lee. “I think that guy just doesn’t like vids with too many Imperials in them, but he can’t just _say_ that, so he’s gotta find excuses.”

“... Okay,” said Kuo after a pause to think it over. Too much violence or Imperials didn’t interest him, but too much _sex_ had him curious.

Lee’s face split into a grin, and he grabbed Kuo by the wrist to drag him down the hall to his bedroom, locking the door behind him. Then he was opening a drawer and digging through it to find something without an explanation, and Kuo took the moment to look around.

The top of Lee’s dresser was covered in laundry, but based on the lack of smell, it was clean. The edge of the floor by the wall was lined with seemingly random pieces of junk - some electric, some mechanical, all unrecognizable to Kuo - but the middle of the floor was clear. The bed was sort of made, in the sense that Lee had laid out the blankets to make it easier to sit on but hadn’t bothered to make them neat.

Kuo sat on the edge of it, and several seconds later Lee made a noise of success and turned at the same time as he slotted the holovid chip into the side of an expensive holo projector. He set the projector on the very edge of the dresser half hidden under the laundry and turned it on, focused on adjusting the height so that it was roughly at Kuo’s eye level.

“Good?” he asked, hand still on the projector in case Kuo said it needed adjusting.

"It's a little lopsided," said Kuo after a brief pause to consider.

Lee hummed, adjusting the holo's projection slightly before looking up at Kuo again. Kuo gestured to the right, and Lee tilted it just enough to get it perfectly even.

"Good," Kuo confirmed when Lee's eyes came up to silently question for a second time.

Lee grinned, pressing the button to start the vid before jumping across the tiny space to drop onto the bed beside Kuo. He managed to miss only the first few seconds of the previews, settling in with his back against the wall. 

The previews passed with constant chattery commentary from Lee - which actress Dahl liked, what other action vids a particular actor had been in, the time he'd convinced a friend to attempt one of the stupid speeder spins. At first Kuo was annoyed; if this was what the next two hours was going to be like, he'd condemned himself to two hours of _hell_. 

Then the holo started, and Lee's voice drifted into silence.

The holo's first scenes weren't action. Nor were they propaganda-laden exposition. The first few scenes were the briefest of romances between a man who was an Imperial officer, and a man who had recently joined the rebellion. 

Kuo felt his face go hot, and risked a glance to the side at Lee. His brother was sitting with his back straight against the wall, eyes wide with fascinated surprise - he hadn't known this was coming either, which meant it wasn't some kind of cruel joke.

The tension turned into a kiss, and the kiss turned into -

Kuo did his best to make his reach for the pillow as subtle as possible, awkwardly placing it in his lap, eyes glued to the holo. If he looked away he would be admitting something was wrong - and he might miss something.

He heard Lee move, and held in a sigh. Of course this thing - this glorious, upsetting, awkward, _horrible_ thing - was going to end.

Instead Lee made it into Kuo's sightline by way of collapsing onto his front, face resting in his arms, his gaze intent. Fascinated. The look he got when he was taking mental notes.

When the scene was over - the moment had stretched on like hours and then compressed into seconds - Lee heaved a sigh, and Kuo let himself start to breathe again.

As the holo moved forward and the Imperial and the Rebel went back to their designated roles, Kuo and Lee began to relax. There was even a brief, stilted conversation about several of the action sequences. 

Their next conversation was smoother, a discussion that started when Lee scoffed at the physics of a particular sequence of speeder bike turns and Kuo mentioned an article he'd read that was only tangentially related. Lee was happy to talk about it anyway, prodding for more details right up until the two men met for a second tryst in the back room of a sex club in Nar Shaddaa.

Kuo's voice died half way through a sentence. Lee didn't seem to notice. Silence save for the hushed tones and panting of the men in the holo.

They didn't speak again until the holo was finished, the inevitable propaganda-required deaths of both men involved stinging a little more than they usually would. 

"So..." said Kuo, his voice small. "Probably good you didn't watch that with Dahl?"

"Yeah," agreed Lee. He swallowed as he pushed himself up off his front to sit next to Kuo against the wall while avoiding eye contact. "I mean, I don't think we'd've gotten past... yeah."

There was a long pause before Kuo spoke again.

"Pretty good for an action vid," he offered.

"Pretty good," agreed Lee, running a hand through his hair.

Kuo hesitated as he tried to sort out how he felt about the situation - the entire thing was beyond awkward, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd been invited to do anything. He had acquaintances, not friends. Dahl and Shan seemed to generally pretend he wasn't there. Their father had largely given up on getting him to behave like a _boy_ , although he did make an effort to at least _talk_ to him. 

He was saved from any further internal conflict by Lee, who had apparently recovered from the effects of the holo enough to strike up the conversation they'd been having when the scene had changed to - to _that_ \- and didn't seem to think that the end of the holo meant the end of the evening. 

They agreed before bed that they should do it again some time, and Kuo went ahead and assumed that _some time_ meant _probably never_.

Two days later and Lee was knocking on his door. 

“Kuuuuooooo,” he called.

“What?” called Kuo, looking up from his datapad to stare at the door, snorting as he heard Lee let his forehead bump against it.

“Wanna keep me company in the garage?” asked Lee.

“Not really,” called Kuo after a sigh. It had been stupid to assume Lee didn’t _also_ want to fix him. Just because he was kinder about it didn’t make him different.

“You can bring your datapad,” offered Lee, his voice desperate. “We can retract the windows in the speeder and you can sit in there.”

Kuo sat up properly, eyes narrowed. “You… just want me to read closer to you.”

“No,” replied Lee. “Kinda,” he immediately amended. “Now I feel stupid.”

“I can do that,” said Kuo after a pause to consider. 

“ _Yes_ ,” said Lee, the word of success just quiet enough that Kuo wasn’t entirely sure if he was supposed to have heard it.

He was true to his word, letting Kuo sit in the speeder with the windows down without any expectation that he give a shit about what Lee was doing elsewhere in the garage. Most of the evening was spent in a companionable sort of silence, the holonet quietly playing music in the background. Once or twice Lee turned the volume of the holonet up high enough that nobody outside the garage would know that he’d stopped humming and started singing.

_Lee hid things too_ , and not just when they were criminal. The realization kept Kuo from resenting Lee _too_ much the next day when he got into a snarling argument with their mother over brushing up against his Nineteen-Hundred curfew.

The third time it happened they ended up on the back porch after dark, the light on above their heads to keep Lee within their parent’s sight. Kuo sometimes doodled on flimsi - he wasn’t very good, but it was something to do - and Lee seemed perfectly happy to tag along.

It wasn’t until Kuo asked where Dahl’d gone that night that he was reminded that his thirteen year old loser self was decidedly not anywhere _near_ the top of Lee’s preferred companions.

“ _Out_ ,” said Lee, the word spoken with far more seething resentment than Kuo had realized he was capable of as he stared out at the yard. 

It was even more off putting given how content Lee had seemed to talk with Dahl and their father about speeders over supper as usual. Kuo was brought to mind of the time Lee had dragged someone into a back alley and broken their arm and three fingers on his behalf, and the memory drew out a wince. He hadn’t asked for that kind of defense, but Lee had a vicious streak buried under several layers of congeniality, and that vicious streak had saved Kuo a lot of pain.

He chose to ignore both the seething and the reminder. He may as well enjoy the attention while it lasted.

The terms of Lee’s probation kept him on their parents' property between Nineteen Hundred and Oh-Seven, and as the weeks passed, the two developed a pattern: if Dahl was gone, they spent their evenings together, and if Dahl was in, Kuo stayed in his room.

Which meant that Lee spent more time with Kuo by far - he hadn’t realized it until now, but both Lee and Dahl seemed to deal with their mother by not being at home. With Lee around so often it became clear that it was difficult for him and their mother to exist without conflict, and a significant part of it had nothing to do with anything he’d done. 

There was even an evening when Lee quietly admitted that sometimes he did things just so he’d actually deserve the animosity. The idea made Kuo slightly nauseous, but he couldn’t deny the logic of it.

The more time went on, the more Lee behaved like a trapped sun-cat. He didn’t so much work on projects in the garage as pace in circles, started to be waspish with Fain unprovoked, and was increasingly showing despondence and frustration in turns at the seams.

Eventually it got so bad that Kuo found himself waking at Oh-Six and thirty to the sound of Lee at his door.

“Kuo,” hissed Lee, his voice loud in the silence of the house.

Kuo groaned and shoved his head under both his pillows and most of his blanket. Now was an _unholy_ time to be having to deal with Lee’s pathological need to have another person around at all times.

“Kuo, I’m going out to the beach,” he whispered at the door.

“Fuck off,” Kuo mumbled into the mattress, knowing that Lee couldn’t hear him. 

There was a pause.

“Kuo,” repeated Lee, “Kuo, I’ll upgrade the holonet connection on your datapad if you come with me.”

Kuo withdrew from beneath the pillows and blanket to stare at where he knew the door was in the dark. “You can do that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” replied Lee, immediately launching into a whispered and totally incomprehensible explanation of the technicalities involved.

Kuo continued to stare in the direction of the door until Fain threw a pillow at it to make Lee stop.

“Fuck off, Fain,” hissed Lee from the other side of the door.

It was Lee’s uncanny ability to tell that it was Fain that had responded with a pillow to the door that convinced Kuo to grab his glasses off the side table and start collecting clothes to take to the ‘fresher and change.

He let himself move slowly, knowing that Lee couldn’t leave until Oh-Seven anyway and so taking mild, petty revenge. 

When he was finished getting ready he stepped out onto the back porch to find Lee standing about a metre from the edge of their backyard, staring at the chrono he’d taken to wearing on his wrist. Kuo wandered out across the yard towards him, confused that Lee wasn’t already dragging him out into the alley.

“What’re we waiting for?” he asked after a brief pause to watch Lee stare down at his wrist.

“Mom’s chrono is slow,” Lee explained, not looking up from where the seconds were passing.

“I thought you said it was fast,” Kuo pointed out.

“The one in the kitchen is fast,” he clarified, “but the one in their bedroom is slow. The one in the living room is accurate so that dad doesn’t notice. I checked.”

Kuo started to say that Lee sounded paranoid, but looked over his shoulder at their parent’s bedroom window instead, and bit the words back.

At exactly twelve past Oh-Seven Lee stepped off the property. He wasn’t followed by shouting, but Kuo glanced back at the house to find their mother scowling on the back porch, and hurried to catch up before she could find an excuse to keep him there.

They didn’t walk through town toward the harbor, but up over the hill on the other side toward the empty beach. It was all very picturesque: light casting through the dew on the grass, the sun burning away the last gasps of fog, the waves touched with gold, still gentle before the wind truly picked up.

All Kuo could think about was how tired he was, how damp his pants were below the knees, and exactly how fast the upgraded holonet connection on his datapad had to be to make this worth it. He’d have to ask if Lee could find a way to bypass the Imperial censorship - he’d only been eleven when Alderaan was destroyed, but he was absolutely certain that the information he could find now didn’t match up with what he remembered seeing on the holonet at the time.

Once at the beach Lee stood on the sand with his hands in his jacket pockets, staring out at the ocean.

“Dahl and I were supposed to go check dad’s thymops traps while the water was quiet,” he volunteered before Kuo could ask. “If we check for him, he lets us keep some of the money.”

“Where’s Dahl?” asked Kuo.

Lee collapsed to sitting and then let himself fall backward, lying with his arms stretched out on either side, hair immediately full of sand. “Fucking some girl,” he explained without feeling.

Kuo tried not to flinch at the matter of fact vulgarity, taking the time to sit cross legged next to Lee. “How do you know?”

“She’s all he’s been talking about for _weeks_ ,” complained Lee, “and last night they were both at a party, so if he’s not back…” he gestured vaguely.

“Gross,” said Kuo with a grimace - the last thing he wanted was to think about Dahl _having sex_ , much less sex with a _girl_.

Lee laughed instead of calling him immature, and for a moment they were both silent, Kuo looking out at the water and Lee staring at the sky.

“I don’t get it,” said Lee, still staring up. 

“Don’t get what?” asked Kuo.

“Girls,” replied Lee.

Kuo sighed as his stomach sank, starting to draw patterns in the sand in pre-emptive boredom.

“I mean, they’re fine, I guess,” continued Lee, his tone thoroughly unconvinced. Kuo’s eyes flickered back up to take in Lee’s frown. “But the way everybody talks is like their tits are full of orgasm stardust or something.”

Kuo’s laugh was so startled that he choked on it, unable to articulate a reasonable response.

“Like, what’s so fantastic about a girl’s legs?” asked Lee. “They’re _legs_.”

“Dunno,” mumbled Kuo, too awkward to say anything else.

“And what’s so hard about talking to them?” continued Lee, his hands coming up to gesture. “They’re just… you just _talk_ to them.”

“Yeah,” whispered Kuo in the space Lee briefly left.

“Dahl got called a hero because he can talk to girls fine once he psychs himself up,” said Lee. “The fact that it isn’t hard for me at all means that some of the guys act like I’m practically a god.” He made a noise of disgust. “Pathetic.”

“I guess,” replied Kuo - it seemed to him that talking to _boys_ was _just_ as difficult as talking to girls, and not just because he might get hit.

There was a long silence before either of them spoke again.

“I hope he’s having fun,” stated Lee, his voice flat and his expression resentful.

Kuo hummed instead of giving a proper answer, and Lee sighed deeply before looking over.

“Do you still collect shells?” he asked - the question seemed neutral instead of like a trap, and so Kuo answered honestly.

“Sometimes,” he admitted. He still kept his collection on the windowsill.

“I haven’t messed around down here during the day in _ages_ ,” said Lee as he rolled himself up onto his feet and shook sand out of his hair with both hands. “Let’s see if we can find a good one.”

The last time they'd spent a day on the beach had been several years ago, and the morning passed not unlike how Kuo remembered it. They wandered down the sand searching for shells, calling out to each other when they found something odd washed up or a type of creature they didn't recognize. When the planet's star rose high enough that the air started to warm, they pulled off their shoes and jackets and waded into the tide pools.

The two largest differences between now and before were that when they found odd things Kuo usually knew what they were, and Lee could give Kuo stories about the parties he was never invited to. Lee would have been happy to just listen to Kuo's explanations of the beach, but Kuo couldn't help but be _fascinated_ by the social world he was excluded from.

That there was more driftwood on the beach out past the other side of the harbor, and so the parties there had fires and were more fun. That every now and then someone would get up the guts to drag race over the shallows, and when stormtroopers inevitably showed up, they'd all have to scatter. That Lee had never won a race - the speeder bike his parents had gotten rid of when he'd been put on probation hadn't been fast enough - but it was a popular joke to get him to bless the engines.

Some time past Eleven Hundred a comm went off and made Kuo jump - he didn't have a comm, and Lee's had been taken by his parents. Lee hopped out of the tide pool they were exploring and dug around through his jacket pockets, pulling out the illicit comm and answering it with audio only.

"You've got Lee," he stated, the words casually confident in a way Kuo couldn't hope to imitate.

" _Remember that girl I've been talking about?_ " asked the person on the other end - it was Dahl, so used to talking to Lee that he didn't bother clarifying who it was.

_Told you_ , Lee mouthed at Kuo. "Yeah," he said aloud.

" _Her parents are gone all weekend_ ," said Dahl. " _Can you cover for me?_ "

"How'm I supposed to cover for you?" asked Lee without bothering to hide his frustration. "I wasn't out and I'm not supposed to have a comm."

" _You'll figure something out_ ," said Dahl, the absolute confidence of his dismissal meant to be flattering.

"... Fine," said Lee after a pause to roll his eyes.

" _Thanks!_ " replied Dahl. " _She's pretty good - I'll tell you about it later._ "

"Sounds good," said Lee, his expression utterly unenthusiastic but his tone successfully neutral.

They traded goodbyes, and for several seconds Lee stared at his comm.

"Do the two of you trade sex stories every time?" asked Kuo. He wasn't sure how he felt about the idea; it was uncomfortably voyeuristic.

" _He_ does," replied Lee bitterly, dropping the comm onto his jacket before turning to the tidepool and stepping back in next to Kuo. 

"We're not heading home?" asked Kuo in surprise - being chosen over Dahl hardly ever happened.

"D'you want to?" countered Lee without looking up from where he was elbow deep in the water working at the shell he'd been digging out before the comm chime.

"What about Dahl?" asked Kuo.

"He'll figure something out," replied Lee, glancing up to flash Kuo a nasty smile.

They didn't go back until well past Oh Thirteen Hundred with two shells and a tiny brachyura claw for Kuo, an interestingly twisted piece of driftwood for Lee, and shoes filled with sand. 

Supper was tense. Lee kept his mouth shut. Lunch the next day was tenser. Still no excuse from Lee. The afternoon would have been intolerable if not for the fact that Lee managed to act like nothing was wrong, humming to the audio of the holonet as he worked on the speeder while Kuo read in the backseat.

When Dahl came back the shouting from inside was fierce, and Lee turned up the volume on the audio.

"If you go out the front of the garage you can sneak in through the back door," said Lee, leaning on the open speeder window's edge once the shouting was finished. "You can avoid Dahl and our parents that way."

Kuo nodded and got out of the speeder, making it to the front garage door just in time to see Dahl come in from the door that accessed the garage from the house. He looked _livid_ , and Lee's expression was utterly unapologetic.

Unlike their parents they didn't yell, and the next evening when Fain did her best to get a rise out of them at dinner they were once again a united front of conversational avoidance.

For three days Dahl was around a little more, and Kuo stayed out of his way.

Another two days passed where Dahl was back to avoiding their house. Lee and Kuo spent those evenings together - but Lee didn't mention the datapad, and Kuo gave up on ever getting the holonet connection upgrade.

On day six, Lee was knocking on his door, and Kuo indulged his resentment and ignored him.

"Kuo," Lee called for a third time. He paused, and then - "Fain's in the living room. Are you -"

"No!" shouted Kuo as he scrambled off the bed towards the door and threw it open. "No I'm not!"

"Got your datapad on you?" asked Lee with a grin, a chip wrapped in plastic held up in one hand.

Kuo's anger deflated in the face of Lee's smile and the fulfillment of his promise. "Um." He looked over his shoulder to cast around the room he shared with Fain like he didn't know it was right on his bed where he'd left it.

"Meet me in the garage," said Lee before bounding down the hall. Kuo dove for his datapad off the bed and followed, sliding in his socks on the floor.

By the time he caught up to Lee, his brother was sitting in the backseat of the speeder with a box open next to him, tapping a thin metal tool against his chin as he stared into the box. He looked up with a smile as Kuo slid into the seat next to him and offered him the datapad.

Lee leaned past him before he took it, locking the far door and then his own.

"Probably good if nobody sees this unwrapped," he explained.

"Is it -" started Kuo, managing to stifle the second half of the question. Shan had asked Lee if something he owned was illegal once, and Lee had stopped sharing anything with him.

"Fell off the back of a truck," replied Lee as he carefully pulled at the edges of the plastic. The chip inside was delicate, pieces of metal on one side and stamped with the Imperial symbol on the other. "Had to get a friend to wipe the digital serials, I don't have the shit here to do it myself. That's why it took so long."

Kuo took a deep breath in, held it while he adjusted to the fact that his datapad was about to be wildly illegal, and then let it all out.

"Isn't wiping serials more of a slicer thing?" he asked as he watched Lee carefully pry open the datapad's side.

"It's really not that different from mechanics" said Lee, eyes focused on what he was doing. "It's mostly all timing and fiddly bits anyway."

"That... doesn't really sound right..." murmured Kuo - from his understanding, there was a fairly big difference between the two. It somehow wasn't surprising that Lee might not realize that other people couldn't do what he did. It was a shame droid parts were scarce and therefore expensive. 

"If I could get away with going to my friend's shop I might've just gotten you a new datapad," continued Lee, switching between tools to start working the innards apart, the datapad frame sitting in his lap. "Trying to shove all the guts of a new 'pad into the frame of an old one sounds like fun."

"What do you miss most from before probation?" asked Kuo, his curiosity about the relative criminality of Lee's life getting the better of him.

The answer was entirely different from what he'd expected.

"Lakros practice," he replied, eyes coming up to stare through the speeder and out the front at the wall.

"... Do you even play lakros?" asked Kuo after a pause.

"Nope," said Lee, sighing deeply before refocusing on what he was doing.

"Why -" began Kuo with a frown.

"Would you hold onto this?" asked Lee, handing Kuo a tool without looking.

The next forty minutes passed in near silence as Lee performed what Kuo could only describe as surgery on his ‘pad, several pieces of the datapad coming off the internal board before the Imperial holonet access chip could be installed. Most of the parts then had to go back in, poked and prodded with various delicate tools before being fastened in place.

When Lee finished tapping the frame back together, he pressed the button on the side to turn it back on, and handed it to Kuo. While the datapad was starting, Kuo inspected casing - there was no evidence that it had ever been opened at all.

"Not bad, huh?" asked Lee with a satisfied grin.

"How often do you do this kind of thing?" asked Kuo.

"Not much anymore," replied Lee, his expression fading into a resentment that was darker than he was used to.

Kuo was distracted from commenting by his datapad beeping the start-up chime, immediately focused on pulling up the holonet. There was absolutely no wait time to pull up the first article, and no wait for the second, and no wait for the pop up holo of the clothes catalogue he'd been dying to flick through.

"The chip connects to the holonet without the planetary filter," said Lee, "which means it's not totally Imperial free, but you should at least be able to get _galactic_ Imperial garbage instead of _local_ Imperial garbage."

"Thanks," said Kuo, putting down the holo and using the viewscreen to start looking up topics he knew were censored.

"I've heard that the galactic holonet is pretty raunchy," continued Lee, "so the next time Fain's out of your room you should -"

Kuo made a loud noise of disgust and shoved Lee away, earning him a peal of laughter followed by cursing from them both as the open box of tools scattered around the backseat.

He was on the holonet reading until well past Oh Five Hundred despite the fact that he had school in the morning. When he went to put his datapad where he hid it out of Fain's view between the mattress and the wall, he hesitated. 

Instead of putting it away he turned the light of the screen as low as he possibly could and made absolutely certain the audio was off before pulling the blanket over his head and inputting the title of the actionvid he'd watched with Lee the previous month. He'd thought about it a bit - a lot - since they'd seen it, and if the galactic holonet was raunchy...

... He deleted the text without activating the search and put away his datapad.

Three minutes later something clicked in his head and he sat up straight as a board in his bed.

"Girls don't play lakros," he announced to the room.

Fain growled and threw her pillow at his head. 

Kuo let the pillow buffet across him, picking it up out of his lap almost a full minute later and adding it on top of his own before flopping onto his back.

Lee hid things too and didn't get girls and resented Dahl for talking about them and had been _just_ as interested in the actionvid as Kuo and had an _awful lot to say_ about the main actor and _there wasn't a girls' lakros team_ and so if Lee didn't play that meant the only reason he had to be there was -

Kuo stared at the fuzzy blur that was the ceiling for a far longer time than was really reasonable just basking in the feeling of _not alone not alone not alone_.

He spent the entire next day trying to work up the courage to ask Lee about it - and Dahl was home for the evening. The day after Lee fought with their mother, Kuo's courage failed him, and he resolved to ask at a time in the general future that made sense.

On the first day of their weekend Kuo found himself lying across the backseat of the speeder while Lee worked - he was pretending to read, but his head was filled with endless combinations of how to talk to Lee. Whether he should risk starting with a confession, or try to approach it from the side like Lee did, or -

He heard the garage door opening and popped his head up over the edge of the backseat, peering out the back window at where Lee was talking to a girl. He couldn't hear the conversation, but he could see Lee's enthusiasm and the way she kept trying to touch him and some horrible combination of disappointment and unfair resentment curled in his stomach.

Kuo watched as Lee opened up the hood of a speeder that probably belonged to the girl, and hid when Lee jogged into the garage for some tool or another. After the sound of Lee collecting the tool and jogging back out passed, Kuo once again looked over the edge of the backseat.

It didn't take long before it was clear that the thing Lee was really enthused about was looking at the inside of an unfamiliar speeder model - once the hood was up his eyes hardly went to the girl at all, and he kept stepping just outside her reach. She stared down with transparent appreciation when Lee got down under the speeder, his shirt riding up just high enough to show the top edge of his pants. 

Once he was back out there was a flicker of annoyance as he caught her expression, and he promptly put the _entire_ speeder between the two of them, leaning on the top and resting his chin on his arms to talk to her, the happy facade back in place.

She might be into him, but he wasn't into her _at all_ , and relief washed through Kuo at the realization.

He still didn't manage to work up the courage to talk to Lee.

The day after was perfect - his mother had taken Fain shopping, their father had taken Dahl to the junkyard in the next town over where Lee wasn't allowed, and Kuo had the entire afternoon to convince himself to talk to his brother.

At Oh Fourteen Hundred, Kuo took a deep breath and ventured out of his room.

The house was strange when it was this quiet, light catching on dust in the air through the kitchen window, no sound drifting in from the door to the garage, the living room empty of people. 

Kuo decided to check Lee's room before the garage on the pure basis that it was closer, padding down the hall in his socks and standing outside Lee's door. For barely half a moment he considered shouting at Lee about jacking off before dismissing it out of hand as being far too brave.

Instead he took another deep breath, lifted his hand to knock - and heard Lee softly say something he couldn't understand and an unfamiliar man's voice respond. He froze, hand dead in the air. Lee was using the comm he wasn't allowed to have, most likely talking to someone he wasn't allowed to talk to.

Kuo's curiosity got the better of him almost instantly, and he pressed his ear up against the door.

" _\- you off as soon as your probation is done_ ," said the man - something was odd about the way he was speaking, but Kuo wasn't sure what it was.

"I'm gonna die unless you do," said Lee with a breathless laugh.

" _We can go out by the cliffs_ ," said the man, and Kuo's stomach dropped as he realized what he was listening to. " _Right in the middle of the day._ "

"Fuck," hissed Lee. "It's gonna feel good to have your mouth around my -"

Kuo reared back from the door, his face burning, his ears ringing, the socks on his feet and long practice the only thing that kept him quiet as he threw himself down the hall and back into his room.

Once there he dove under his covers, trying to calm his breathing and stay as still as possible so that if Lee had heard him and came to investigate he would hear him coming.

There was silence, and slowly Kuo began to relax.

As the tension eased, his fear was replaced by relief which was replaced by a frustrating combination of disgust and jealousy.

After a long moment of stewing in his feelings, Kuo came to the conclusion that he was being unfair; it made sense that an afternoon that was perfect for Kuo to talk to him was also a good afternoon to do _that_. 

Which made it perfect for other things too - Kuo briefly threw the blankets off his head, reaching down between the mattress and the wall for his datapad before withdrawing back under the blankets. Lee might have access to - to other people - but Kuo had access to the _raunchy galactic holonet_. He input the title of the actionvid, shutting his eyes and activating the search as fast as he could before he lost his nerve.

The afternoon passed far faster than he expected as he searched through lists of a _particular kind of actionvid_ , too intimidated to look for anything more... more.

He always felt like Fain coming home was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, but today he really, truly meant it.

For the next several days he felt particularly awkward around Lee, but nobody seemed to notice. Every time he tried to convince himself it was a good idea to talk to Lee the words _your mouth around my_ filled his head, and eventually he gave up on ever, ever talking to Lee about anything to do with boys _ever_.

Two weeks later was the end of Lee's probation, and the end of the time they spent together - the very first day of freedom that Lee had, he was out of the house the entire evening. Kuo couldn't help but stay up listening, sighing deeply when he heard probably-Dahl quietly making his way down the hall, and sighing again when he heard definitely-Dahl-and-Lee coming back through forty minutes later, whispering between them briefly in the hall

It stung, but Kuo had known that things were going to go back to how they were.

He still felt a little less alone.


End file.
